Providers of existing wireless communication systems and wireless services have significant investments in so called “legacy” equipment in order to support one or more wireless infrastructures, such as the broadband Personal Communications Services (PCS). Legacy equipment generally includes base station equipment, customer premises equipment (CPE), such as cellular phones, paging devices, and the like, and other terminal hardware. Due to the widespread use of legacy equipment, the cost of hardware to build such legacy equipment has become relatively inexpensive.
Unfortunately, although legacy equipment may be relatively inexpensive, band licenses for the necessary frequency bands to be used by that equipment are still very expensive. Providers of wireless services are currently scrambling to find additional frequency bandwidth to increase their network capacity, and therefore accommodate more customers or subscribers. The purchase of new licenses for additional frequency bands is, for some providers, a risky proposition. This is due, in part, to substantial capital that must be invested in the new hardware infrastructure to take advantage of the additional band licenses. However, some service providers already own licenses to use such additional bands, yet some of those additional bands are underutilized. For example, the MMDS band has been traditionally used to provide one-way analog wireless “cable” TV broadcast services. However, such use of the MMDS band has had only marginal success.
The base station and CPE equipment for wireless cable services are expensive to manufacture, and there are relatively few subscribers for such services. However, the MMDS band is an attractive band because it has a wider bandwidth than the PCS band, and could therefore support a higher network capacity than the PCS band. For example, a provider might own a license to use 15 MHz of the PCS band, and 200 MHz of the MMDS band in a particular geographic area.
To that end, while using the MMDS band or some other available band may be desirable to increase network capacity, generally, a new hardware infrastructure with associated CPE would be required to support the band.
Therefore, it would be desirable to increase network capacity while still using the existing legacy hardware, such as for an existing PCS infrastructure. Use of existing hardware would reduce the cost of any capacity increase. Thus, there exists a need for a wireless communication system that increases the effective capacity available to a provider of wireless services without a corresponding substantial increase in cost to the provider.
It is also desirable to implement additional bandwidth for increased capacity without a significant change in the existing hardware infrastructure.